Saturday, May 20, 2017

Reading 'Eua

[I know that I seem to be relying on the podium to support me, and that any moment I might dive, or rather slide, into the text I'm trying to read, but it was a pleasure to appear at the Auckland Writers Festival yesterday, in a Pacific Tales session that also featured Courtney Sina Meredith, Gina Cole, and Brit Bennett. I was given ten minutes to read from The Stolen Island, and tried the following passages out on the audience, in an attempt to convince them that they ought to take their next holiday on the wonderful island of 'Eua...]

Although many of
my students had travelled overseas, as singers and dancers and musicians in
‘Atenisi’s performing arts society, few of them had set foot on ‘Eua. The
island is only twenty kilometres from Tongatapu, and can be reached by a three
hour ferry ride or an eight minute flight, but it feels like one of the Kingdom
of Tonga’s remoter outliers. Where Tongatapu is flat, copiously cultivated, and
adorned by scores of villages, ‘Eua is high, bushy, and underpopulated. A reef
lies only a few metres off the island; fish as tiny and bright and skittish as
butterflies live in its gashes and basins. The reef is so close to shore that
‘Eua has few of the good beaches or deep lagoons that palangi holidaymakers
crave.

‘Eua has been
neglected by scholars, as well as by tourists. The island’s rainforest is the
largest in Tonga, but it has hardly been explored by botanists. The thousands
of caves and sinkholes in its highland have yet to interest speleologists, and
the ancient forts on its ridges and hilltops have gone unsurveyed and
unexcavated.

‘Eua’s people are
as unusual as their environment. ‘Eua has been inhabited for thousands of
years, and in pre-Christian times acquired its own deities and storied sacred sites.
But most of the indigenous ‘Euans lived along the island’s western coast, in
villages that looked across the water at Tongatapu; the plateau in the centre
of the island and the highland above its eastern coast remained almost
uninhabited.

Eight decades
after the resettlement of the ‘Atans on ‘Eua, another group of refugees arrived
on the island. They had come from Niuafo’ou, the northernmost piece of the
Kingdom of Tonga. Niuafo’ou is a volcano whose crater is filled with water that
periodically steams and boils. In 1946 the water turned to lava, and poured out
of the lake and over Niuafo’ou’s villages and plantations. The island was
evacuated, and its people were resettled on ‘Eua, where they found the dialect
baffling and the air cold. Some of the Niuans eventually went home, but many
stayed on ‘Eua. They built houses and churches on the island’s plateau and
named these settlements after the devastated villages of their homeland.

The three peoples
of ‘Eua have maintained their separate identities and settlements. Sometimes
only a road separates different villages with different dialects and cultures...

In
the morning I walked to Kolomaile. I had put on a ta’ovala, the woven mat
Tongans wear around their waist for formal occasions, and filled my backpack
with folders of photocopied documents. The morning was cool, by Tongan
standards, but I was soon sweating.

The
road south along ‘Eua’s plateau was lined with villages. Some of them – Esia,
Futu, Petani – had the names of the long-lost settlements of Niuafo’ou; others
had been established by the descendants of ‘Eua’s first inhabitants, and harked
back to ancient sites on Tongatapu. Sometimes different villages sat on either
side of the road, their churches and kava clubs confronting one another.
Chinese women with blank faces sat behind the metal grilles of squat buildings,
selling sim cards and unlabelled packets of locally grown tobacco. The road was
made from crushed coral, and the plateau’s winds had turned the trunks and
leaves of roadside mango and ironwood trees white.

As I
walked, I counted the denominations: Free Wesleyan, Catholic, Mormon,
Jehovah’s Witness, Baptist, Church of Tonga, Independent Church of Tonga.
Satellite dishes rose as proudly as spires from some of the larger houses in
each village. The berms beside the road had been mown and weeded, but burned
out cars and utes lay across them, like victims of drone strikes.

Kolomaile
was the last village on the road, the southernmost village in Tonga. Most of
the houses were rectangles of weatherboard. Mould was painting them green. In
front yards elderly women wearing straw hats and black skirts raked leaves and
shards of coconut shells toward the road. A skinny suckling pig turned on a
spit, then disappeared in a puff of brown smoke.

The
village’s store was staffed by a young Tongan woman who looked at me blankly
through her metal grille. The store rubbed shoulders with a corrugated iron
shack where a dozen men smoked and stood around a pool table. When I stepped
inside the shack the game and the conversations went on. Nobody looked at me,
and I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stepped back outside and tried to
deny my embarrassment by ordering something through the grille of the store.
The shelves behind the unsmiling storekeeper were almost empty; I eventually
asked for a couple of lollipops that had melted into their wrapping. When I
pushed a two pa’anga note through the grille the woman giggled quickly, and
pushed the money back at me along with the sticky sweets.

I saw
a middle-aged woman in a black dress and massive ta’ovala walking into the
village, and hurried towards her. She saw me coming and turned quickly down a
side road, scattering some chickens. I turned south, and walked towards the
southern end of the village, where the art deco spire of a Mormon church rose
out of bush. An elderly woman was walking north, carrying a plastic bag filled
with taro in one hand and a plastic bag filled with firewood in the other. I
waited for her to turn down a side road, into the heart of the village, then
followed. She heard me following and walked faster. I increased my speed. In a
minute or two I was walking alongside her, and she had to stop, put down her
bags, and acknowledge me.

‘Malo
e le lei. Malie. I’m interested in the history of Tonga. I’d like to talk to
someone who knows about the history of Kolomaile, of ‘Ata. I have some
documents that – ‘

‘Are
you looking for the minister?’

‘No.
Well, maybe. I want to talanoa about the history of ‘Ata. I have tohi. I have
makasini.’

‘Go and
talk to Mozzy.’

‘Mozzy?’

‘Masalu
Halahala. He is senior. His family started ‘Ata. He knows the stories.’

She
pointed at a blue and white house a couple of streets away.

‘I
was on ‘Eua in 2013. I talked with a young woman, Pesi – ‘

‘Pesi
isn’t here. Pesi went to Tongatapu to be with her sister.’

‘Can
I help you with those bags?’

‘’Ikai. 'Alua.’

Pigs
and dogs followed me to the front door of the little blue and white house. I
knocked, waited, knocked again. I heard laughter, and turned to see a couple of
women in an adjacent yard staring at me. I waved at them. They laughed again.

Masalu
Halahala took several minutes to answer the door. ‘I was sleeping’ he muttered,
squinting at his doorstep. He must have been more than sixty years old, but his
hair was as thick and black as the bristles of a paintbrush. He was wearing a
tattered blue raincoat, which he tried unsuccessfully to zip up. ‘It’s cold’ he
said. ‘Too cold for Tonga. Too cold for ‘Eua.’

While
I repeated the introduction I’d tried on the elderly woman, Masalu coughed
loudly. ‘Pesi is gone’ he said. ‘She lives on Tongatapu now. If you want to
talk with me, come back here on Sunday.’

‘Back
to this house?’

‘Back
to this village. Come to our church. I am Free Wesleyan. You have a family, eh?’

‘Yes,
I have a wife, and two boys, Aneirin and Lui.’

‘Only
two, eh?’

‘Well,
it’s hard in Nu’u Sila – expensive, these days, to have kids.’

‘You
too poor, eh?’

Masalu
was chuckling. I thought about the green houses and sagging telephone wires of
Kolomaile.

‘It’s
different in Auckland. You have to pay a mortgage, and – ‘

‘Big
families are good. But you bring your family to church. Kava at nine, service
at ten, eat afterwards.’